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Category: Miscellaneous

File editing within a docker container with cat

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Configure Selenium and Chrome to use Tor proxy

I’ve been trying to configure Selenium and Chrome to use Tor as proxy and constantly getting error messages like the following:

WebDriverException: Message: invalid argument: cannot parse capability: proxy
from invalid argument: Specifying ‘socksProxy’ requires an integer for ‘socksVersion’
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.44.609545 (c2f88692e98ce7233d2df7c724465ecacfe74df5),platform=Mac OS X 10.14.0 x86_64)

In the end I have to use HTTP proxy instead of SOCKS.

Install and start Tor:

Install privoxy:

Configure privoxy (vi /usr/local/etc/privoxy/config) to chain it with Tor:

Start privoxy by default on port 8118:

Check if your traffic is proxied:

Now you should see a different IP than your real one.

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Docker Postgres “PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record”

It seemed that my Postgres database was not properly shut down when rebooting and when I tried to use docker-compose to start it again, the following message was shown in docker logs:

To fix this, first shut down this container (docker-compose down), then start the container in interactive mode:

After the transaction log is reset, everything should be fine. Now you can start your containers again (docker-compose up -d).

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Migrating/Installing Prestashop to Amazon AWS EC2

Recently I migrated a Prestashop website to AWS/EC2 and the process is quite smooth. Here’s how to do it.

1. Get your Website data: including Prestashop website files and a latest database dump. Remove all the files except index.php in /cache/smarty/compile and /cache/smarty/cache. (See here.)

2. Launch your EC2 instance. But before doing that, check first if a pre-configured or managed Prestashop is available in your preferred region (more info here). If not, choose the appropriate instance type and get it running. In my case I chose Ubuntu Linux.

3. Install the AMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP). On Ubuntu you can simply do it with a few simple commands:

Make sure that you remember your password for MySQL root user and phpmyadmin user.

4. Copy your database dump and website files to your EC2 instance using scp, for instance:

5. Create a MySQL user for Prestashop, you don’t want to use the root user for this purpose. You can do this using phpmyadmin or a command line. Also, create a database for Prestashop and grant the user you’ve created just now all privileges on this database.

6. Import your database from the dump:

7. Extract your website files on your EC2 instance. In my case, inside /var/www/html/. If there is an index.html file inside this directory, remove it first. Make sure you set the correct user and group to all the website files:

Note that if don’t set the correct permissions, you may get complaints from Apache, like the following:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception ‘SmartyException’ with message ‘unable to write file /var/www/html/cache/smarty/compile/46/d9/69/wrt54ecd6c1856a72.61943173’ in /var/www/html/tools/smarty/sysplugins/smarty_internal_write_file.php:44

Stack trace:

#0 /var/www/html/tools/smarty/sysplugins/smarty_internal_template.php(201): Smarty_Internal_Write_File::writeFile(‘/var/www/html/c…’, ‘<?php /* Smarty…’, Object(Smarty))

#1 /var/www/html/tools/smarty/sysplugins/smarty_internal_templatebase.php(155): Smarty_Internal_Template->compileTemplateSource()

#2 /var/www/html/classes/controller/AdminController.php(1936): Smarty_Internal_TemplateBase->fetch(‘controllers/mod…’)

#3 /var/www/html/classes/controller/AdminController.php(2337): AdminControllerCore->initModal()

#4 /var/www/html/classes/controller/Controller.php(163): AdminControllerCore->init()

#5 /var/www/html/classes/Dispatcher.php(373): ControllerCore->run()

#6 /var/www/html/admin123/index.php(54): DispatcherCore->dispatch()

#7 {main}\n  thrown in /var/www/html/tools/smarty/sysplugins/smarty_internal_write_file.php on line 44

8. Enable mcrypt for PHP:

9. Update your Prestashop settings in the config/settings.inc.php file. Set the correct database information.

10. Enable mod_rewrite:

Also, make sure to add something like the following in your apache site configuration file:

And then remember to restart your apache server.

11. Install sendmail:

12. Go to your Prestashop back office and reconfigure your domain. Go to Preferences -> SEO & URLs and scroll down to Set shop URL section.

Now everything should be OK, your new Prestashop website is available on your new domain!

If you have any issues, just drop a line here or email me.

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WordPress pages load very slowly after Google is blocked

After Google is completely blocked in China since May 31, I’ve had problems loading my website. After some investigation I found out the problem lies in loading failure of Google Fonts. Since it takes a long time to fail, the page waits before it fails and display with the fallback styles.

To solve the problem, I crawled the font styles from Google and put it up on my server. Then I changed the WordPress theme to use the font style on the server. Everything seems to work perfectly after that.

Another option would be completely disable Google Font Styles. This can be easily done using the WP plugin “Disable Google Fonts”, if you’re using WP’s default twenty-* themes. In my case, I would have to comment out two lines in Mog Theem Functions file (functions.php). Since my theme relies on Google Fonts, instead of commenting out the lines, I changed these to lines to use the localized style file:

 

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Raspberry Pi as a toy web server

1. Tell my router to route certain traffic to the Raspberry Pi. For example, I route HTTP and SSH traffic to one of my Pi’s. I disabled password login for  SSH, using public key authentication instead: in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, use the following setting and restart SSH service using `sudo service ssh restart’.

2. Getting my IP address of the Raspberry Pi. I firstly created a PHP script on my domain to record the IP address in a text file.

Then tell the Raspberry Pi to report its IP address every 5 minutes, using crontab:

After a while the IP address is recorded in the text file and updated every 5 minutes.

3. Optionally create a DNS record for the Pi. I use Cloudflare to manage DNS settings by myself, so just add/update an entry in Cloudflare’s settings. I point pi.daoyuan.li to the IP address of one Pi. This can be done automatically in the future.

4. Install Flask on the Pi.

5. Install nginx and uwsgi on the Pi.

6. Set up nginx along with uwsgi and Flask.

Edit nginx config:

Edit uwsgi config:

Create a simple Flask app:

Start up uwsgi:

7. Done! http://pi.daoyuan.li:5000/

 Update on June 24, 2014:

Getting the external address in step 2 can be done by running this command in Raspberry Pi:

See: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/5427/get-your-external-ip-address

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NumPy’s ndarray indexing

In NumPy a new kind of array is provided: n-dimensional array or ndarray. It’s usually fixed-sized and accepts items of the same type and size. For example, to define a 2×3 matrix:

When indexing ndarray, it supports “array indexing” other than single element indexing.  (See http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/basics.indexing.html)

It is possible to index arrays with other arrays for the purposes of selecting lists of values out of arrays into new arrays. There are two different ways of accomplishing this. One uses one or more arrays of index values. The other involves giving a boolean array of the proper shape to indicate the values to be selected. Index arrays are a very powerful tool that allow one to avoid looping over individual elements in arrays and thus greatly improve performance.

So you basically can do the following:

Besides, when you do equals operation on ndarrays, another ndarray is returned by comparing each element:

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Debugging Apache configuration files on Mac OS X

Sometimes I make some modification to my site’s apache config and apache stops functioning, but I cannot get enough information from /var/log/apache2/error.log. Here’s a command that will tell you where the problem is:

It starts apache for debugging and prints out the messages on screen, so that hopefully you can find something useful.

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Facebook vs. Google advertisements

Since last week I’ve been investigating how to efficiently promote our website (yabroad.com). Our Facebook page got 139 likes a week ago, and now we have 175. Among the 36 new likes, 22 are from two Facebook campaigns. The first campaign cost 15 dollars and earned 20 likes, averaging 0.75 dollars per like with a click-through rate of 0.290%. In a way this is affordable and more efficiently than stand at international students’ dormitory in Shanghai and spread flyers. Three of us probably sent out around 100 flyers to international students but got nothing to our Facebook page nor website. The first campaign focused on gaining new likes and it went quite well; our second campaign cost 5 dollars, promoting a video post with a goal to earn new likes. This campaign boosted another 2,169 reach, 143 clicks and 2 new likes. Had the video been more engaging, probably we could have gotten more clicks, shares and likes. Since Facebook users nowadays are exposed more and more to various contents, it’s become increasingly difficult to get users engaged.

In the meanwhile, we also launched three campaigns on Google Adwords. So far we got 30 clicks and cost about 40 dollars. The average CPC is $1.36 — almost twice of that for FB, but the conversion rate is zero. No one has applied or enquired our pages (maybe due to the low volume). Google Adwords is different from Facebook. On Facebook you attract people to your FB page but not your website; whereas Google takes visitors directly to your website. FB leaves you a space for imagination, though. Once you get a page like from someone, he/she will be able to see the updates your page posts.

Suppose the Google CPC is twice of Facebook CPC, if one in two earned FB followers click one of our promoted posts, FB is doing better. That does not sound like a issue. I’d place all my bet on Facebook and maybe time to buy FB shares?

We also tried to promote on LinkedIn but failed to find appropriate ways. LinkedIn is mainly for serious jobs, not internships. Instagram neither, there seems to be a lot of robots on Instagram; it’s not clear for us to find a way to promote ourselves, either. So for the moment, we only consider Facebook and Google. Oh no, Facebook is our focus and Google is not helping much, but we still need to spend the remaining 90 dollars we got from a coupon, slowly.

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OpenVPN client TLS-Auth problem on Windows

It seems that the OpenVPN Client on windows does not support TLS-Auth with a separate key file. So instead, you can paste your key contents in your openvpn client’s config file and use some thing like the following (inline ta.key):

When not using the above but using something like:

The server log shows something like:

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funf smart phone data collecting

读完几本大数据的书,偶然发现了一个叫funf的手机应用,号称能将安卓手机变身为数据收集器。于是我很兴奋的下载安装,让这个app在我手机上采集了两天的数据,分析得到的结果如下:

battery_life phone_temperature relative_activity screen_activity

 

老实说,收集了两天的数据,就能分析出这么点东西,着实让人失望。不过这个生成图像信息的程序是开源的,而且是用Python实现的,今后有空了也可以自己来分析一下收集到的数据。funf在我的手机上也经常不能响应,可以说这个app是十足的半成品。不过这个由来自MIT的团队开发的不仅仅是一个手机app,号称是一个Open Sensing Framework,前几天还刚刚被Google收购了。虽然是个半成品,但Google这个时候收购团队总比让他们羽翼丰满之后再收购所花的代价要小得多。

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Block unauthorized ssh login attempts (attacks)

My friends and I am working on a hobby project and  we need a Git server, so I set up one on my MacBook Pro. We access the repository via SSH. However when I checked the ssh log I found someone trying to get ssh access to my machine by guessing usernames. The log looks as follows:

I first tried to use DenyHosts, however, there are still attempts from other IP addresses. Since there are three of us accessing the repository, I configured the hosts.allow and hosts.deny manually: deny all hosts other than the IP addresses I trust.

hosts.deny:

hosts.allow:

Now the log file should be quite…

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Migrating JComments to WordPress

I switched back to WordPress from Joomla! after I registered this new domain. After migrated all the posts to WordPress using FG Joomla to WordPress, I noticed the comments have not been transferred. After some digging I didn’t find satisfactory plugin to do that, so I wrote my own PHP script to fulfill this task. The code is also available from GitHub.

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Port already in use issue of Arduino for Eclipse plugin

When uploading with avrdude the plugin give a error prompt saying “Port already in use” (while no other application is using the port). After clicking OK it actually uploads the program to Arduino board.

port_in_use

After reading issue #6 I check the librxtxSerial.jnilib in eclipse:

While in my Arduino application the librxtxSerial.jnilib output is:

So I just copied the Arduino.app//Contents/Resources/Java/librxtxSerial.jnilib file to eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/419/1/.cp/librxtxSerial.jnilib It works after restarting eclipse. No error prompts are shown.

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